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Monday, July 30, 2012

Sarah Hamill, a graduate student at the Faculty of Law, U of A, has an article in the most recent issue of the Canadian Journal of Law and Society, entitled "Making the Law Work: Alberta's Liquor Act and the Control of Medicinal Liquor from 1916 to 1924." Sarah has drawn my attention to her acknowledgement of the Osgoode Society for a graduate student grant which supported the research.

Here's the abstract:

This paper uses the example of the control of medicinal liquor during prohibition in Alberta to explore how the methods of control altered during the eight years of prohibition. This paper argues that the system used to control medicinal liquor changed from a prosecutorial system to a regulatory system. This shift from prosecution to regulation was essential in ensuring that medicinal liquor was actually controlled and allowed medicinal liquor to become an alternative as well as an exception to prohibition. This paper focuses on explaining the success of administrative control rather than the courts’ attempts to control administrative action and thus examines administrative law and practice from the ground up. Consequently, this paper uses a broad definition of administrative law which includes the regulations, policies and practices created and used by the provincial state in its attempt to control medicinal liquor.

Monday, July 9, 2012

In the summer 2012 issue of the University of Toronto Law Journal, Angela Fernandez of the U of T Faculty of Law has an article provocatively titled "The Future(s) of America Legal History."

Here's the abstract:

Critical Legal History (CLH) is currently being subjected to sustained critique and re-examination by some legal historians. This review essay looks at this debate in the context of two recent books on American legal history: Christopher Tomlins's Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580-1865 (2010) and Laura Edwards's The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (2009). In keeping with the thrust of CLH scholarship, both books problematize the connection between law and narratives of freedom and equality in American history, and both show law as a significant force for non-freedom and inequality. Yet, in a recent symposium on Robert Gordon's classic article 'Critical Legal Histories' (1984), both authors chose to distance themselves from CLH. After explaining what is significant and important about each book, this review essay describes the debate in that symposium. Notwithstanding the extensive disagreement between the contributors over the use of so-called 'mandarin' legal materials in historical research (sources like legal treatises that reflect elite perspectives), the review essay makes the point that this disagreement is much less important than the challenge raised about the long-term tendencies and preoccupations of CLH and asks what difference it might make to take the postmodern turn advocated by these authors.

The article considers the twentieth century Western movement towards secularization and religious fragmentation, focusing on Québec, Canada's efforts to legislate religion. Some of the legislation and case law considered include the 1975 Québec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, the 1982 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and both Canada's Criminal and Civil codes. The article also considers legal topics dealing with religious pluralism, the notion of reasonable accommodation, multiculturalism, and the protection of minorities against the hegemony of the majority.

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